Moon Shadow: The Totally True Love Adventure Series (Volume 1) (21 page)

The phone has finally stopped ringing. I pause in the act of putting on my moccasins, staring at my box of books. Something looks out of place, and at the same time it occurs to me I don’t have anything to read at the beach. I take out my
Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad and see a sheet of paper underneath. It looks like a page from my mother’s diary. I pick it up and read:

Dear Dan,

By the time you find this, I will have gone away with your father. I love him very much. I’ve placed your mother’s diary in the safest of hands. I sense that the book is like a charm, with magical powers protected by your mother’s reflective spirit. I am certain that you will find it, and when you do, you will know the truth about your mother’s death. I trust then that you will tell only Mike. That is what your mother would have wanted, I am sure. Your mother took the pills because she had found my pearls and thought your father bought them for her birthday. But when her birthday passed and the pearls were gone, she knew your father was having an affair. She couldn’t handle that. By the way, for my birthday party I switched the pearls Mike bought me with the real ones, the ones your father bought me. I learned a lot about your mother from her diary, for example how when she was a young girl her maternal grandfather took advantage of her, just as my father took advantage of me, though he bought me the best beauty pageant gowns and jewelry, like my eighteen carat gold anklet. I will miss your mother’s diary.

Juliette

I’m struck with a sense of dismay, followed by a surge of hopeful expectation. The adrenaline courses through me as I hand the note to Sarah.

Then suddenly I feel the presence of another person in the house and I glimpse my mother as she whisks by in the living room with an expression on her face I used to see only on Easter Sundays. While her look in life had been characteristically serene and fixed, at this moment it’s unusually animated, like the face of a stage actor. The entire experience lasts no more than a few seconds, but I’m certain of having seen my mother, and even now a kind of diffused magnetism, seeping in from the living room, pervades my room. I’ve never believed in ghosts, and yet, somehow, I’m still afraid of them.

“Wow! We’d better call my mom,” Sarah says, after reading the note. She isn’t aware of the spectral moment I just experienced. She adds, “But wait, maybe Julie’s just gone crazy or whatever. I always thought she was more than a little goofy. We can’t believe her. Let’s take some time to consider a few things first, like if we can find your mother’s diary. What does Julie mean by ‘in the safest of hands?’ We have a riddle to solve. It’s like one of those mysteries my mom used to read, by Agatha Christie.”

Troubled by a sense of dark foreboding, I reply, “I think Julie is playing some sort of dangerous game.”

I
walk to the window and look out. The early evening light is failing. Daniel sits on the edge of his bed with hands clasped between his thighs. He has been quietly watching me, since we woke from having crashed together on the bed for a couple of hours. We aren’t playing any music, just trying to solve the riddle of Julie’s note.

I want to make an entry in my diary, but not with Daniel there, because I would write personal stuff about him. I’m so in love with Daniel that it hurts, and I’ve been thinking about sex, or rather, not having had sex with him.

As I turn and look at Daniel, I have a sudden revelation. “How did you learn that your mother had a diary?”

Daniel smiles. “Like you, I was nosing around where I didn’t belong.”

“In her dresser, right?”

Daniel slaps his forehead with the heel of his hand. “How stupid of me,” he says. “It’s so simple.”

“Uh-huh. There’s a mirror over her dresser, right?”

“Reflective spirit,” he goes on, “and the safest of hands, which, as far as Julie is concerned, is the last place anyone else, like my father, would look, yet a place where I could certainly find it.”

“And where exactly would that be, Sherlock?”

Daniel plays along. “Think about it, Watson. I couldn’t ‘just find it’ in my mother’s casket. And Julie wouldn’t have left the diary with
her
mother if only Mike and I were to know what’s written there, the truth about her death.”

“And remember,” I say, “Julie put the diary under the protection of your mother’s spirit.”

“She wouldn’t have left it with Mike.”

“Why not?” I’m putting on my socks and sneakers.

“He’s my brother, and I love him dearly, but he has a lot of issues. Besides, I searched his room.”

“Tell me then, where’s the diary?”

“I believe it’s back in my mother’s chest of drawers, where I first found it, and where Julie must have found it, too, which, now that I think about it, makes me wonder what she was doing in there.”

I believe Daniel could solve even the most difficult of riddles. I put Julie’s note in my purse, and I shove the purse under Daniel’s bed, with my suitcase. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

“Wait a minute,” Daniel says solemnly. He walks over to the window. “I’m so close now to finding my mother’s diary, that I want to savor the moment. I suppose I’m feeling some reluctance, you know, like perhaps I shouldn’t intrude, shouldn’t risk tarnishing my mother’s blessed memory.”

“I know what you mean,” I say. It’s a difficult decision. But it might help clear your conscience. Maybe she wrote something just for you, something that she wanted you to see.”

“I guess ... you could be right.”

“I’ll wait here, Daniel, if you wish.”

Daniel gazes sharply at me. He can probably see just how much I really want to be with him when he finds the diary.

He smiles thinly. “C’mon, let’s get this over with.”

Daniel walks slowly through the bathroom. I follow, a step behind, my hands on his waist. He opens the door to his father’s bedroom. Once we’re inside, he closes it. The windows are shut, shades drawn. The room is cloaked in semi-darkness.

I stand at the foot of the bed, looking around the room. “Gosh, Daniel, you’re sitting on the bed your mother once slept in. Doesn’t that make you feel weird?”

“The bed on which she died, too,” Daniel says incisively.

I feel his anger like it’s my own, and I want to lighten the moment. “Oh, be quiet, it’s spooky enough in here already.”

“Should I switch on the lamp?

“No, I’m all right.” I continue, “Do you ever talk to your mother, I mean now that she’s in Heaven? I always talk to my ... dad, or I used to, anyway. I would be walking home from school and I’d tell myself, if a leaf falls from that tree before I count to ten, well, that’s my dad sending his love down from Heaven. I’ll bet your mother is proud of you, and I’ll bet she’s happy, now that she’s up there with God and the angels.”

“I haven’t let her know how I feel about her death, if that’s what you mean. Sometimes I want to ask, ‘Why did you leave me?’”

It occurs to me, and it’s probably a leftover “little girl’s fear,” that I might one day wake up and all this, the thrill of being in love with a sensitive boy like Daniel, the precious moments of shared intimacy, will burst like a bubble, like Alice coming out of the rabbit hole.

“Okay, here goes,” says Daniel.

I sit next to him on the bed, as Daniel opens the dresser drawer and slides his hand under his mother’s clothes. Slowly, he brings his hand out. He’s holding a red book, his mother’s diary. His eyes seem filled with delight, and perhaps, I’m sure, a little trepidation. He clutches the diary and holds it to his breast, and then he looks closely at the book and runs his fingers over the raised gold lettering on its cover:
Diary of
Mary Rosen
.

He closes the drawer and hands the book to me, and I hold it in both hands, fingers trembling. I look at Daniel and he puts his arm around me.

“Let’s wait a few minutes before we peek inside,” he says.

“What kind of stuff do you expect to find in your mom’s diary?” I ask.

“I don’t know, personal things, I guess. Like the reason she took her own life.” His penetrating dark eyes almost cause me to shudder.

“Wow, that’s heavy,” I say. “Do you have any hypotheses?”

He looks at the floor. “Just what Julie said in the note, if she’s telling the truth. My father didn’t treat my mother very well.”

“Did he yell at her? My dad, uh, William, yelled at my mom sometimes.”

Daniel keeps his eyes cast down. “Worse than that.”

“You don’t have to tell me, Daniel.” I want so much to know for certain that Frank is not my father.

“It used to make me angry,” Daniel says, poignantly.

As he looks at me I can see his pain, reflected by his face. In a cracked voice he adds, “I wanted to do something, but ... well, one night, last fall, I came home late after being with Liz. My mother and father were arguing in the living room. I was in the kitchen getting a snack. My mom had found Liz’s letters, and she’d been drinking and my dad was pissed. I heard the dull, thick sound of my father’s fist, striking my mother. A wire snapped in my head and I went after him. My dad is really tough and he moved in fast and slapped me across the face and grabbed my throat, pinning me against the wall. I retreated to my room like a whipped dog.”

I take his hand in mine and squeeze gently. I make no reply, because I don’t know what to say. Can it be that I’ve come to understand this complex boy? Impossible, I decide. It’s only one of my brief attacks of common sense.

But it’s probably the same for both of us. We’ve finally found our twin. We are from different worlds, and yet we are so similar. In his arms, I know who I am, Sarah, just Sarah, and that’s more than enough.

“I care a lot about you, Sarah,” says Daniel. “I’ve fallen in love with you.” He turns away, head down. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that my father did terrible things to my mother. He’s not really the way he appears to you and your mother. It’s an act. He treated my mother badly. He’s an evil man.”

I sort of want to believe Daniel is lying, but I know he isn’t. What if Frank
is
my father? Pictures of all the kissing and touching with Daniel flash through my mind. We’d be going to hell for sure.

I let myself cry, quietly.

Daniel nudges me and I see the sense of urgency in his eyes. “Someone’s here,” he says.

I stop crying because I hear it too, the crunching sound of gravel as a car pulls into the driveway.

“My father is supposed to be out of town,” Daniel says. “But now I don’t know. Mike is working. It could be your mother. Do you think she would come into the house?”

“I don’t know, I can’t think. I don’t want to go home.”

“Let’s hide in my mother’s closet.”

Daniel takes my hand, and we scramble noiselessly into the closet, clearing a space against the back wall, behind the clothes on hangers, amongst his mother’s shoes. Daniel closes the closet door, and we sit in utter darkness. As we listen for the noise of someone entering the house, he puts his arm around me and hugs me. I nestle my head on his shoulder, with the red diary in my hands.

S
itting quietly with Sarah in the darkness of my mother’s closet, I’ve been evoking phantoms that have lived an eternity in my soul, until I hear the bedroom door opening.

A few seconds later My father says, “Where’s the diary? I’m pleased you told me about it. I would have never known. If that thing were to get into the wrong hands ...”

There’s the sounds of some shuffling about, and then Julie says, “I put it right here ... this morning. I swear, Frank.”

I sit absolutely rigid: an expectant rigidity as when, from the darkness of my own bedroom, not long ago, I would hear my mother plead for mercy.

“How could anyone have taken it?” my father says in a frustrated tone. No one’s been here, no one else knew about it. Mike told me Dan’s gone to the beach.”

There’s a moment of silence and then my father speaks again: “All right, we’ll deal with the diary later, Sugar. Let’s have a little fun before we leave for the cabin.”